Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, data, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., bandwidth and transmit power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems, and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. Other examples of wireless network systems include one or more of the wireless standards published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), such as 802.11 for Wireless local area networks (Wireless LAN or WLAN).
Generally, a wireless multiple-access communication system can simultaneously support communication for multiple wireless terminals. Each terminal communicates with one or more base stations via transmissions on the forward and reverse links. The forward link (or downlink) refers to the communication link from the base stations to the terminals, and the reverse link (or uplink) refers to the communication link from the terminals to the base stations.
With the emergence of multiple wireless communication technologies in wider deployment, the need for establishing connections to more than one wireless communication system simultaneously may often arise. For example, a device such as a laptop computer, personal digital assistant (PDA), or mobile phone, may need to establish a first wireless connection to a first device, such as a wireless access point, to obtain data services to the Internet, and may also need to establish a second wireless connection to a second device, such as a mobile storage device for data storage. Existing efforts for providing multiple wireless connections typically involve either adding dedicated hardware and software modules to support each wireless network type, which undesirably consumes significant device area and is expensive, or otherwise employing complex software changes and or hardware changes for time sharing a single hardware module between the multiple network types simultaneously. The latter attempt often suffers from performance degradation, such as the inability to provide certain services, for example, due to the nature of time sharing a single hardware module.
Accordingly, there remains a strong need in the art for efficiently supporting simultaneously multiple wireless communication systems.